Do teens of the Facebook generation value privacy?

For years now, adults have been grumbling about kids these days and how they have no sense of privacy. Always posting everything to Facebook, sharing their lives on Twitter, bantering with friends on MySpace … where’s their good-ol’ sense of self-respect and privacy?

If you feel this way … well, how do I put this gently? You’re wrong.

A new study, based on interviews with more than 160 teenagers, found that the young and the restless indeed have a marked sense of privacy. It’s just that with the medium – Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, whatever – come different assumptions and expectations of what is public and what is private.

And, I hate to break it to you: Adults may be the ones – not the kids – who are violating social privacy norms.

(Nicholas Kamm/Getty Images)

Let’s take the following scenario. You just joined Facebook, and of course your teen has had a profile for many years. You see that he or she and her friends post information about themselves, about each other, about their feelings – or make inside jokes or complain about classes. To them, Facebook is – in large part – simply another venue for friendship, just like the mall.

And just like the mall, Facebook is public. But, like they do at the mall, your kid and his or her friends expect some level of privacy in their chattering or gossiping or whatever they’re doing.

The thing is, they see it this way – you probably don’t. Most parents see Facebook as a public space where their children just shout personal information about themselves out into the world. But teens, knowing things on Facebook are public by default, self-edit and actively share only what they want to share with the Facebook world. And they tailor specific messages to specific audiences (likely not you), and expect them to be received that way, according to Microsoft researchers Danah Boyd and Alice Marwick.

“Examining the practices of urban life, sociologist Erving Goffman recognized that people regularly go out of their way to ignore each other in busy environments,” they wrote in a draft report on teens and social privacy (PDF). “In restaurants, people often dine close enough to overhear every conversation, but they pretend to not listen in. This act of ‘giving someone space’ is a gift of privacy. Goffman calls it ‘civil inattention.’

“Civil inattention is a social norm, driven by an ideal of respect. Staring at someone or openly listening in on their conversations is a violation of social norms which makes people uneasy because it is experienced as an invasion of privacy. For teens, the same holds true online; they expect people – most notably, those who hold power over them – to respect their space.”

So that time you scolded your teenager – publicly, on Facebook, in front of friends – by commenting on that status update about falling asleep in Mrs. Ingerson’s class? That, my dear adult, was likely a breach of privacy and respect in your child’s eyes.

Parents justify this action with the argument that it’s online, so it’s public, so it’s fair game, the Microsoft researchers wrote. But that’s a distinctly generational perspective.

As Boyd and Marwick wrote in their research paper, which was last updated Monday and will be presented June 2 at the Privacy Law Scholar’s Conference in Berkeley, Calif.:

Consider what happened in Old Saybrook, Connecticut, when local law enforcement and teachers put together an assembly for students on privacy. To make a point about privacy, the educators put together a slide show of images grabbed from students’ Facebook profiles and displayed these images to the student body. Students were furious. One student told a reporter that this stunt is “a violation of privacy.” Most adults find this incredulous given that the content was broadly accessible – and that the students in the school had already most likely seen many of these images because they certainly had access to them. Yet, by taking the images out of context, the educators had violated students’ social norms and, thus, their sense of dignity, fairness, and respect. As one student explained to a reporter, “I kind of thought, it’s like if you put it online, anyone can see it, but then at the same time, it’s like kind of not fair for the police officers to put that on display without their permission and without them knowing.”

This incident does not reveal that teens don’t understand privacy, but rather, that they lack the agency to assert social norms and expect that others will respect them. Those who have power over them – their parents and the police – can use their power to violate teens’ norms, using accessibility as their justification. In this way, adults further marginalize young people, reinforcing the notion that they do not have the social status necessary to deserve rights associated with privacy.

But it’s true: Facebook is public, for the most part. (Boyd and Marwick call it and other social media “networked publics.”) Anything teenagers say or post or tag or “like” can be seen by all of their friends – if not by innumerably more people they don’t even know.

Which is why, among teenagers, there is an informal – yet very much real – etiquette for social networks that you probably don’t even know about. And that’s why your kids get so mad whenever you comment on anything of theirs.

Everyday social dynamics are predicated on the notion that most interactions are private­‐by-­default, public-­through-effort. The default is private, not because it needs to be but because effort is required to actually make things visible.

With social media, the opposite is assumed. The very act of participation in networked publics makes content widely available to many interested parties, effectively the relevant “public.” Rather than choosing what to include or what to publicize, most teens think about what to exclude. They accept the public nature of information, which might not have been historically shared (perhaps because it was too mundane), but they carefully analyze what shouldn’t be shared. Disclosure is the default because participation – and, indeed, presence – is predicated on it.

Just like adults – ‘cuz, you know, kids are humans too – different teenagers place varying value on privacy. Some kids keep more to themselves, some kids blab about whatever crosses their mind at any given moment. But all teenagers – all of them, Boyd and Marwick say – want privacy. At least some sense of it.

The mere fact today’s kids are all on Facebook (and the vast, vast majority are – one teenager in the study said, “You’re expected to be on Facebook”) does not imply they reject privacy, the researchers wrote. In fact, to avoid the prying eyes of parents or teachers or other kids they don’t like, tees devise interesting strategies to share things with some people on Facebook while keeping it from others.

And it’s not like Facebook’s own privacy settings really help – they’re set up mainly to keep strangers or “creepsters” from accessing a person’s Facebook profile or status updates. Tools are limited for sharing with select groups of Facebook friends.

While early users of MySpace tried to signal boundaries on social network sites by carefully choosing who they friended, parents often forced their children into friending them as a condition of using the service, devaluing the Friends list as a signal of the intended audience. Facebook opened up to colleges and high schools before the general public, creating a structural boundary that is now defunct. Today, many teens use language to signal boundaries, attempting to clearly mark Facebook as a space for friends by using casual language, social photos, in-jokes, cultural references, and other styles of sharing that teens use when they are with each other. Unfortunately, many adults fail to recognize these strategies as signals, instead projecting their own values onto teens’ practices and judging teens through their worldview. …

By using different strategies to achieve privacy in networked publics, teens are simultaneously revealing the importance of privacy and public life. They want to participate in networked publics, but they also want to have control over the social situations that take place there. They want to be visible, but only to certain people. They want to be recognized and validated, but only by certain people. This is not a contradictory stance; it parallels how people have always engaged in public spaces.

So maybe, parents, it might be good to have that “Facebook talk” with your kids – not necessarily about what they can or can’t post, but to agree on boundaries and expectations of privacy. That way you might avoid their “defriending” you.